After
the undeniable success of its ZIP drive, Iomega, the worldwide leader in
external storage, had to find new products to develop their business. That’s
why the company founded in 1980,
invested the lucrative burner market during the past few years. Iomega today
presents what we can call the Predator 2;
a new compact external burner that can record CDs at the high speed of
24x.
External portable burners are a must have for laptop owners and users who
travel a lot and need being able to burn CDs anywhere, anytime. Extremely
fast, the drive uses the USB 2.0
interface and carries out an innovative design. Until now, Iomega burners
weren’t very interesting, but this new Predator unveils new promising
possibilities we’ll review in details, here.

Iomega
Predator 24x10x40
main features are:

External USB 2.0
CD-Burner,

CD-R &
CD-RW recording support,

CD-R
recording speed of 24x,

CD-RW
recording speed of 10x,

A
reading speed of 40x,

DAE
(Digital Audio Extraction) at 32x,

Buffer Underrun Protection,

Iomega
HotBurn software.

Setup

First of all, the Predator is capable of high speed burning and reading,
only if you have a USB 2.0
chain. Indeed on USB 1.1
PCs, the burner will operate at the maximal speeds of 4x4x6.
Thankfully, Iomega provides an Adaptec AUA-2000
USB 2.0
card (depending on the package) with the Predator so if you’re not yet USB 2.0
equipped, you just have to add this PCI card to your PC. The card offers two
external USB 2.0
connectors. Installing the card is a child’s game: you just have to plug it
in a free PCI slot. Powered by a Nec chip, the USB 2.0
card requires drivers you will have to download from Adaptec’s website,
since as of now, no version of Windows, even Windows XP, natively supports
the USB 2.0.
Once the drivers are installed you need to reboot your PC and then you can
plug the USB cable of your Predator to the PC. The USB cable of the Predator
is a non standard one since it has at one extremity a Iomega Proprietary
ATAPI connector and at the other extremity the casual USB plug. The Predator
obviously comes with an external power adapter that has to be plugged if you
want to use the drive. When the Predator is all connected Windows XP will
instantly recognize it and you’ll be ready to burn! The Predator 24x10x40
doesn't require any specific drivers to operate with the most current
Microsoft operating systems.